Hawthorne, by Henry James

Chapter 2

Early Manhood.

The twelve years that followed were not the happiest or most brilliant phase of Hawthorne’s life;
they strike me indeed as having had an altogether peculiar dreariness. They had their uses; they were the period of
incubation of the admirable compositions which eventually brought him reputation and prosperity. But of their actual
aridity the young man must have had a painful consciousness; he never lost the impression of it. Mr. Lathrop quotes a
phrase to this effect from one of his letters, late in life. “I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my
early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone.” And the same writer alludes to a
touching passage in the English Note–Books, which I shall quote entire:—

“I think I have been happier this Christmas (1854) than ever before — by my own fireside, and with my wife and
children about me — more content to enjoy what I have, less anxious for anything beyond it, in this life. My early life
was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would
compare favourably with it. For a long, long while, I have occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have
an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college, or,
sometimes, even, at school — and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to
make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and
depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or
thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after
leaving college, when everybody moved onward and left me behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call
myself famous and prosperous! — when I am happy too.”

The allusion here is to a state of solitude which was the young man’s positive choice at the time — or into which he
drifted at least under the pressure of his natural shyness and reserve. He was not expansive, he was not addicted to
experiments and adventures of intercourse, he was not, personally, in a word, what is called sociable. The general
impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking side of his character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as
it points to him as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at fault. He was silent, diffident, more
inclined to hesitate, to watch and wait and meditate, than to produce himself, and fonder, on almost any occasion, of
being absent than of being present. This quality betrays itself in all his writings. There is in all of them something
cold and light and thin, something belonging to the imagination alone, which indicates a man but little disposed to
multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society. If we read the six volumes of Note–Books with an eye to
the evidence of this unsocial side of his life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time that
there was nothing unamiable or invidious in his shyness, and above all that there was nothing preponderantly gloomy.
The qualities to which the Note–Books most testify are, on the whole, his serenity and amenity of mind. They reveal
these characteristics indeed in an almost phenomenal degree. The serenity, the simplicity, seem in certain portions
almost child-like; of brilliant gaiety, of high spirits, there is little; but the placidity and evenness of temper, the
cheerful and contented view of the things he notes, never belie themselves. I know not what else he may have written in
this copious record, and what passages of gloom and melancholy may have been suppressed; but as his Diaries stand, they
offer in a remarkable degree the reflection of a mind whose development was not in the direction of sadness. A very
clever French critic, whose fancy is often more lively than his observation is deep, M. Emile Montégut, writing in the
Revue des Deux Mondes, in the year 1860, invents for our author the appellation of “Un Romancier Pessimiste.”
Superficially speaking, perhaps, the title is a happy one; but only superficially. Pessimism consists in having morbid
and bitter views and theories about human nature; not in indulging in shadowy fancies and conceits. There is nothing
whatever to show that Hawthorne had any such doctrines or convictions; certainly, the note of depression, of despair,
of the disposition to undervalue the human race, is never sounded in his Diaries. These volumes contain the record of
very few convictions or theories of any kind; they move with curious evenness, with a charming, graceful flow, on a
level which lies above that of a man’s philosophy. They adhere with such persistence to this upper level that they
prompt the reader to believe that Hawthorne had no appreciable philosophy at all — no general views that were, in the
least uncomfortable. They are the exhibition of an unperplexed intellect. I said just now that the development of
Hawthorne’s mind was not towards sadness; and I should be inclined to go still further, and say that his mind proper —
his mind in so far as it was a repository of opinions and articles of faith — had no development that it is of especial
importance to look into. What had a development was his imagination — that delicate and penetrating imagination which
was always at play, always entertaining itself, always engaged in a game of hide and seek in the region in which it
seemed to him, that the game could best be played — among the shadows and substructions, the dark-based pillars and
supports, of our moral nature. Beneath this movement and ripple of his imagination — as free and spontaneous as that of
the sea surface — lay directly his personal affections. These were solid and strong, but, according to my impression,
they had the place very much to themselves.

His innocent reserve, then, and his exaggerated, but by no means cynical, relish for solitude, imposed themselves
upon him, in a great measure, with a persistency which helped to make the time a tolerably arid one — so arid a one
indeed that we have seen that in the light of later happiness he pronounced it a blank. But in truth, if these were
dull years, it was not all Hawthorne’s fault. His situation was intrinsically poor — poor with a poverty that one
almost hesitates to look into. When we think of what the conditions of intellectual life, of taste, must have been in a
small New England town fifty years ago; and when we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love of literature
and romance, of the picturesque, of style and form and colour, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of
them, compassion for the young man becomes our dominant sentiment, and we see the large dry village picture in perhaps
almost too hard a light. It seems to me then that it was possibly a blessing for Hawthorne that he was not expansive
and inquisitive, that he lived much to himself and asked but little of his milieu. If he had been exacting and
ambitious, if his appetite had been large and his knowledge various, he would probably have found the bounds of Salem
intolerably narrow. But his culture had been of a simple sort — there was little of any other sort to be obtained in
America in those days, and though he was doubtless haunted by visions of more suggestive opportunities, we may safely
assume that he was not to his own perception the object of compassion that he appears to a critic who judges him after
half a century’s civilization has filtered into the twilight of that earlier time. If New England was socially a very
small place in those days, Salem was a still smaller one; and if the American tone at large was intensely provincial,
that of New England was not greatly helped by having the best of it. The state of things was extremely natural, and
there could be now no greater mistake than to speak of it with a redundancy of irony. American life had begun to
constitute itself from the foundations; it had begun to be, simply; it was at an immeasurable distance from
having begun to enjoy. I imagine there was no appreciable group of people in New England at that time proposing to
itself to enjoy life; this was not an undertaking for which any provision had been made, or to which any encouragement
was offered. Hawthorne must have vaguely entertained some such design upon destiny; but he must have felt that his
success would have to depend wholly upon his own ingenuity. I say he must have proposed to himself to enjoy, simply
because he proposed to be an artist, and because this enters inevitably into the artist’s scheme. There are a thousand
ways of enjoying life, and that of the artist is one of the most innocent. But for all that, it connects itself with
the idea of pleasure. He proposes to give pleasure, and to give it he must first get it. Where he gets it will depend
upon circumstances, and circumstances were not encouraging to Hawthorne.

He was poor, he was solitary, and he undertook to devote himself to literature in a community in which the interest
in literature was as yet of the smallest. It is not too much to say that even to the present day it is a considerable
discomfort in the United States not to be “in business.” The young man who attempts to launch himself in a career that
does not belong to the so-called practical order; the young man who has not, in a word, an office in the
business-quarter of the town, with his name painted on the door, has but a limited place in the social system, finds no
particular bough to perch upon. He is not looked at askance, he is not regarded as an idler; literature and the arts
have always been held in extreme honour in the American world, and those who practise them are received on easier terms
than in other countries. If the tone of the American world is in some respects provincial, it is in none more so than
in this matter of the exaggerated homage rendered to authorship. The gentleman or the lady who has written a book is in
many circles the object of an admiration too indiscriminating to operate as an encouragement to good writing. There is
no reason to suppose that this was less the case fifty years ago; but fifty years ago, greatly more than now, the
literary man must have lacked the comfort and inspiration of belonging to a class. The best things come, as a general
thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same
line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things of course have been done by solitary
workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more
genial circumstances. The solitary worker loses the profit of example and discussion; he is apt to make awkward
experiments; he is in the nature of the case more or less of an empiric. The empiric may, as I say, be treated by the
world as an expert; but the drawbacks and discomforts of empiricism remain to him, and are in fact increased by the
suspicion that is mingled with his gratitude, of a want in the public taste of a sense of the proportions of things.
Poor Hawthorne, beginning to write subtle short tales at Salem, was empirical enough; he was one of, at most, some
dozen Americans who had taken up literature as a profession. The profession in the United States is still very young,
and of diminutive stature; but in the year 1830 its head could hardly have been seen above ground. It strikes the
observer of today that Hawthorne showed great courage in entering a field in which the honours and emoluments were so
scanty as the profits of authorship must have been at that time. I have said that in the United States at present
authorship is a pedestal, and literature is the fashion; but Hawthorne’s history is a proof that it was possible, fifty
years ago, to write a great many little masterpieces without becoming known. He begins the preface to the
Twice–Told Tales by remarking that he was “for many years the obscurest man of letters in America.” When once
this work obtained recognition, the recognition left little to be desired. Hawthorne never, I believe, made large sums
of money by his writings, and the early profits of these charming sketches could not have been considerable; for many
of them, indeed, as they appeared in journals and magazines, he had never been paid at all; but the honour, when once
it dawned — and it dawned tolerably early in the author’s career — was never thereafter wanting. Hawthorne’s countrymen
are solidly proud of him, and the tone of Mr. Lathrop’s Study is in itself sufficient evidence of the manner
in which an American story-teller may in some cases look to have his eulogy pronounced.

Hawthorne’s early attempt to support himself by his pen appears to have been deliberate; we hear nothing of those
experiments in counting-houses or lawyers’ offices, of which a permanent invocation to the Muse is often the
inconsequent sequel. He began to write, and to try and dispose of his writings; and he remained at Salem apparently
only because his family, his mother and his two sisters, lived there. His mother had a house, of which during the
twelve years that elapsed until 1838, he appears to have been an inmate. Mr. Lathrop learned from his surviving sister
that after publishing Fanshawe he produced a group of short stories entitled Seven Tales of my Native
Land, and that this lady retained a very favourable recollection of the work, which her brother had given her to
read. But it never saw the light; his attempts to get it published were unsuccessful, and at last, in a fit of
irritation and despair, the young author burned the manuscript.

There is probably something autobiographic in the striking little tale of The Devil in Manuscript. “They
have been offered to seventeen publishers,” says the hero of that sketch in regard to a pile of his own
lucubrations.

“It would make you stare to read their answers. . . . One man publishes nothing but school-books; another
has five novels already under examination; . . . another gentleman is just giving up business, on purpose, I
verily believe, to avoid publishing my book. In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even
to read my tales; and he — a literary dabbler himself, I should judge — has the impertinence to criticise them,
proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after a general sentence of condemnation, with the
definitive assurance that he will not be concerned on any terms. . . . But there does seem to be one
righteous man among these seventeen unrighteous ones, and he tells me, fairly, that no American publisher will meddle
with an American work — seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new one — unless at the writer’s risk.”

But though the Seven Tales were not printed, Hawthorne, proceeded to write others that were; the two
collections of the Twice–Told Tales, and the Snow Image, are gathered from a series of contributions
to the local journals and the annuals of that day. To make these three volumes, he picked out the things he thought the
best. “Some very small part,” he says of what remains, “might yet be rummaged out (but it would not be worth the
trouble), among the dingy pages of fifteen or twenty-years-old periodicals, or within the shabby morocco covers of
faded Souvenirs.” These three volumes represent no large amount of literary labour for so long a period, and
the author admits that there is little to show “for the thought and industry of that portion of his life.” He
attributes the paucity of his productions to a “total lack of sympathy at the age when his mind would naturally have
been most effervescent.” “He had no incitement to literary effort in a reasonable prospect of reputation or profit;
nothing but the pleasure itself of composition, an enjoyment not at all amiss in its way, and perhaps essential to the
merit of the work in hand, but which in the long run will hardly keep the chill out of a writer’s heart, or the
numbness out of his fingers.” These words occur in the preface attached in 1851 to the second edition of the
Twice–Told Tales; à propos of which I may say that there is always a charm in Hawthorne’s prefaces which makes
one grateful for a pretext to quote from them. At this time The Scarlet Letter had just made his fame, and the
short tales were certain of a large welcome; but the account he gives of the failure of the earlier edition to produce
a sensation (it had been published in two volumes, at four years apart), may appear to contradict my assertion that,
though he was not recognised immediately, he was recognised betimes. In 1850, when The Scarlet Letter
appeared, Hawthorne was forty-six years old, and this may certainly seem a long-delayed popularity. On the other hand,
it must be remembered that he had not appealed to the world with any great energy. The Twice–Told Tales,
charming as they are, do not constitute a very massive literary pedestal. As soon as the author, resorting to severer
measures, put forth The Scarlet Letter, the public ear was touched and charmed, and after that it was held to
the end. “Well it might have been!” the reader will exclaim. “But what a grievous pity that the dulness of this same
organ should have operated so long as a deterrent, and by making Hawthorne wait till he was nearly fifty to publish his
first novel, have abbreviated by so much his productive career!” The truth is, he cannot have been in any very high
degree ambitious; he was not an abundant producer, and there was manifestly a strain of generous indolence in his
composition. There was a loveable want of eagerness about him. Let the encouragement offered have been what it might,
he had waited till he was lapsing from middle-life to strike his first noticeable blow; and during the last ten years
of his career he put forth but two complete works, and the fragment of a third.

It is very true, however, that during this early period he seems to have been very glad to do whatever came to his
hand. Certain of his tales found their way into one of the annuals of the time, a publication endowed with the
brilliant title of The Boston Token and Atlantic Souvenir. The editor of this graceful repository was S. G.
Goodrich, a gentleman who, I suppose, may be called one of the pioneers of American periodical literature. He is better
known to the world as Mr. Peter Parley, a name under which he produced a multitude of popular school-books,
story-books, and other attempts to vulgarize human knowledge and adapt it to the infant mind. This enterprising
purveyor of literary wares appears, incongruously enough, to have been Hawthorne’s earliest protector, if protection is
the proper word for the treatment that the young author received from him. Mr. Goodrich induced him in 1836 to go to
Boston to edit a periodical in which he was interested, The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge. I have never seen the work in question, but Hawthorne’s biographer gives a sorry account of it. It was
managed by the so-called Bewick Company, which “took its name from Thomas Bewick, the English restorer of the art of
wood-engraving, and the magazine was to do his memory honour by his admirable illustrations. But in fact it never did
any one honour, nor brought any one profit. It was a penny popular affair, containing condensed information about
innumerable subjects, no fiction, and little poetry. The woodcuts were of the crudest and most frightful sort. It
passed through the hands of several editors and several publishers. Hawthorne was engaged at a salary of five hundred
dollars a year; but it appears that he got next to nothing, and did not stay in the position long.” Hawthorne wrote
from Boston in the winter of 1836: “I came here trusting to Goodrich’s positive promise to pay me forty-five dollars as
soon as I arrived; and he has kept promising from one day to another, till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I
have now broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of going near him. . . . I don’t feel at all
obliged to him about the editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in the Bewick Company . . . and I
defy them to get another to do for a thousand dollars, what I do for five hundred.”—“I make nothing,” he says in
another letter, “of writing a history or biography before dinner.” Goodrich proposed to him to write a Universal
History for the use of schools, offering him a hundred dollars for his share in the work. Hawthorne accepted the
offer and took a hand — I know not how large a one — in the job. His biographer has been able to identify a single
phrase as our author’s. He is speaking of George IV: “Even when he was quite a young man this King cared as much about
dress as any young coxcomb. He had a great deal of taste in such matters, and it is a pity that he was a King, for he
might otherwise have made an excellent tailor.” The Universal History had a great vogue and passed through
hundreds of editions; but it does not appear that Hawthorne ever received more than his hundred dollars. The writer of
these pages vividly remembers making its acquaintance at an early stage of his education — a very fat, stumpy-looking
book, bound in boards covered with green paper, and having in the text very small woodcuts, of the most primitive sort.
He associates it to this day with the names of Sesostris and Semiramis whenever he encounters them, there having been,
he supposes, some account of the conquests of these potentates that would impress itself upon the imagination of a
child. At the end of four months, Hawthorne had received but twenty dollars — four pounds — for his editorship of the
American Magazine.

There is something pitiful in this episode, and something really touching in the sight of a delicate and superior
genius obliged to concern himself with such paltry undertakings. The simple fact was that for a man attempting at that
time in America to live by his pen, there were no larger openings; and to live at all Hawthorne had, as the phrase is,
to make himself small. This cost him less, moreover, than it would have cost a more copious and strenuous genius, for
his modesty was evidently extreme, and I doubt whether he had any very ardent consciousness of rare talent. He went
back to Salem, and from this tranquil standpoint, in the spring of 1837, he watched the first volume of his
Twice–Told Tales come into the world. He had by this time been living some ten years of his manhood in Salem,
and an American commentator may be excused for feeling the desire to construct, from the very scanty material that
offers itself, a slight picture of his life there. I have quoted his own allusions to its dulness and blankness, but I
confess that these observations serve rather to quicken than to depress my curiosity. A biographer has of necessity a
relish for detail; his business is to multiply points of characterisation. Mr. Lathrop tells us that our author “had
little communication with even the members of his family. Frequently his meals were brought and left at his locked
door, and it was not often that the four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never read
his stories aloud to his mother and sisters. . . . It was the custom in this household for the several
members to remain very much by themselves; the three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself, and,
speaking of the isolation which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said, ‘We do not even live at our house!’”
It is added that he was not in the habit of going to church. This is not a lively picture, nor is that other sketch of
his daily habits much more exhilarating, in which Mr. Lathrop affirms that though the statement that for several years
“he never saw the sun” is entirely an error, yet it is true that he stirred little abroad all day and “seldom chose to
walk in the town except at night.” In the dusky hours he took walks of many miles along the coast, or else wandered
about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, and these were apparently his most intimate occasions of
contact with life. Life, on such occasions, was not very exuberant, as any one will reflect who has been acquainted
with the physiognomy of a small New England town after nine o’clock in the evening. Hawthorne, however, was an
inveterate observer of small things, and he found a field for fancy among the most trivial accidents. There could be no
better example of this happy faculty than the little paper entitled “Night Sketches,” included among the Twice–Told
Tales. This small dissertation is about nothing at all, and to call attention to it is almost to overrate its
importance. This fact is equally true, indeed, of a great many of its companions, which give even the most appreciative
critic a singular feeling of his own indiscretion — almost of his own cruelty. They are so light, so slight, so
tenderly trivial, that simply to mention them is to put them in a false position. The author’s claim for them is barely
audible, even to the most acute listener. They are things to take or to leave — to enjoy, but not to talk about. Not to
read them would be to do them an injustice (to read them is essentially to relish them), but to bring the machinery of
criticism to bear upon them would be to do them a still greater wrong. I must remember, however, that to carry this
principle too far would be to endanger the general validity of the present little work — a consummation which it can
only be my desire to avert. Therefore it is that I think it permissible to remark that in Hawthorne, the whole class of
little descriptive effusions directed upon common things, to which these just-mentioned Night Sketches belong, have a
greater charm than there is any warrant for in their substance. The charm is made up of the spontaneity, the personal
quality, of the fancy that plays through them, its mingled simplicity and subtlety, its purity and its
bonhomie. The Night Sketches are simply the light, familiar record of a walk under an umbrella, at the end of
a long, dull, rainy day, through the sloppy, ill-paved streets of a country town, where the rare gas-lamps twinkle in
the large puddles, and the blue jars in the druggist’s window shine through the vulgar drizzle. One would say that the
inspiration of such a theme could have had no great force, and such doubtless was the case; but out of the Salem
puddles, nevertheless, springs, flower-like, a charming and natural piece of prose.

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too
trivial to be suggestive. His Note–Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his
habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note–Books, by the way — this seems as good a place as any
other to say it — are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding to
them in the whole body of literature. They were published — in six volumes, issued at intervals — some years after
Hawthorne’s death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should
have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the
biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note–Books, but I
am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came
to be written — what was Hawthorne’s purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle.
For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his
habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a
very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play
much the larger part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his
Note–Book into his confidence or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest
way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant,
though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they
might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too
futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and
opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne’s mind (I do not say
that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.
Our business for the moment, however, is not with the light that they throw upon his intellect, but with the
information they offer about his habits and his social circumstances.

I know not at what age he began to keep a diary; the first entries in the American volumes are of the summer of
1835. There is a phrase in the preface to his novel of Transformation, which must have lingered in the minds
of many Americans who have tried to write novels and to lay the scene of them in the western world. “No author, without
a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no
mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as
is happily the case with my dear native land.” The perusal of Hawthorne’s American Note–Books operates as a practical
commentary upon this somewhat ominous text. It does so at least to my own mind; it would be too much perhaps to say
that the effect would be the same for the usual English reader. An American reads between the lines — he completes the
suggestions — he constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice in saying that the picture he
constructs from Hawthorne’s American diaries, though by no means without charms of its own, is not, on the whole, an
interesting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary blankness — a curious paleness of colour and paucity of
detail. Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appetite for detail, and one is therefore the more struck
with the lightness of the diet to which his observation was condemned. For myself, as I turn the pages of his journals,
I seem to see the image of the crude and simple society in which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not
invidiously, but descriptively; if one desire to enter as closely as possible into Hawthorne’s situation, one must
endeavour to reproduce his circumstances. We are struck with the large number of elements that were absent from them,
and the coldness, the thinness, the blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that our foremost
feeling is that of compassion for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as
Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer-European spectacle
— it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of
suggestion for a novelist. If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius,
the same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world around him would have been a very different
affair; however obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his fellow-mortals would
have been almost infinitely more various. The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his
contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might
enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of
American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and
indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no
clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old
country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman
churches; no great Universities nor public schools — no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no
museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class — no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be
drawn up of the absent things in American life — especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of
which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling. The natural remark, in
the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The
American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains — that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. It
would be cruel, in this terrible denudation, to deny him the consolation of his national gift, that “American humour”
of which of late years we have heard so much.

But in helping us to measure what remains, our author’s Diaries, as I have already intimated, would give comfort
rather to persons who might have taken the alarm from the brief sketch I have just attempted of what I have called the
negative side of the American social situation, than to those reminding themselves of its fine compensations.
Hawthorne’s entries are to a great degree accounts of walks in the country, drives in stage-coaches, people he met in
taverns. The minuteness of the things that attract his attention and that he deems worthy of being commemorated is
frequently extreme, and from this fact we get the impression of a general vacancy in the field of vision. “Sunday
evening, going by the jail, the setting sun kindled up the windows most cheerfully; as if there were a bright,
comfortable light within its darksome stone wall.” “I went yesterday with Monsieur S—— to pick raspberries. He fell
through an old log-bridge, thrown over a hollow; looking back, only his head and shoulders appeared through the rotten
logs and among the bushes. — A shower coming on, the rapid running of a little barefooted boy, coming up unheard, and
dashing swiftly past us, and showing us the soles of his naked feet as he ran adown the path and up the opposite side.”
In another place he devotes a page to a description of a dog whom he saw running round after its tail; in still another
he remarks, in a paragraph by itself —“The aromatic odor of peat-smoke, in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant.”
The reader says to himself that when a man turned thirty gives a place in his mind — and his inkstand — to such trifles
as these, it is because nothing else of superior importance demands admission. Everything in the Notes indicates a
simple, democratic, thinly-composed society; there is no evidence of the writer finding himself in any variety or
intimacy of relations with any one or with anything. We find a good deal of warrant for believing that if we add that
statement of Mr. Lathrop’s about his meals being left at the door of his room, to rural rambles of which an impression
of the temporary phases of the local apple-crop were the usual, and an encounter with an organ-grinder, or an eccentric
dog, the rarer, outcome, we construct a rough image of our author’s daily life during the several years that preceded
his marriage. He appears to have read a good deal, and that he must have been familiar with the sources of good English
we see from his charming, expressive, slightly self-conscious, cultivated, but not too cultivated, style. Yet neither
in these early volumes of his Note–Books, nor in the later, is there any mention of his reading. There are no literary
judgments or impressions — there is almost no allusion to works or to authors. The allusions to individuals of any kind
are indeed much less numerous than one might have expected; there is little psychology, little description of manners.
We are told by Mr. Lathrop that there existed at Salem during the early part of Hawthorne’s life “a strong circle of
wealthy families,” which “maintained rigorously the distinctions of class,” and whose “entertainments were splendid,
their manners magnificent.” This is a rather pictorial way of saying that there were a number of people in the place —
the commercial and professional aristocracy, as it were — who lived in high comfort and respectability, and who, in
their small provincial way, doubtless had pretensions to be exclusive. Into this delectable company Mr. Lathrop
intimates that his hero was free to penetrate. It is easy to believe it, and it would be difficult to perceive why the
privilege should have been denied to a young man of genius and culture, who was very good-looking (Hawthorne must have
been in these days, judging by his appearance later in life, a strikingly handsome fellow), and whose American pedigree
was virtually as long as the longest they could show. But in fact Hawthorne appears to have ignored the good society of
his native place almost completely; no echo of its conversation is to be found in his tales or his journals. Such an
echo would possibly not have been especially melodious, and if we regret the shyness and stiffness, the reserve, the
timidity, the suspicion, or whatever it was, that kept him from knowing what there was to be known, it is not because
we have any very definite assurance that his gains would have been great. Still, since a beautiful writer was growing
up in Salem, it is a pity that he should not have given himself a chance to commemorate some of the types that
flourished in the richest soil of the place. Like almost all people who possess in a strong degree the storytelling
faculty, Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature.
Thoroughly American in all ways, he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social distinctions and
his readiness to forget them if a moral or intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. He liked to fraternise with
plain people, to take them on their own terms, and put himself if possible into their shoes. His Note–Books, and even
his tales, are full of evidence of this easy and natural feeling about all his unconventional fellow-mortals — this
imaginative interest and contemplative curiosity — and it sometimes takes the most charming and graceful forms.
Commingled as it is with his own subtlety and delicacy, his complete exemption from vulgarity, it is one of the points
in his character which his reader comes most to appreciate — that reader I mean for whom he is not as for some few, a
dusky and malarious genius.

But even if he had had, personally, as many pretensions as he had few, he must in the nature of things have been
more or less of a consenting democrat, for democracy was the very key-stone of the simple social structure in which he
played his part. The air of his journals and his tales alike are full of the genuine democratic feeling. This feeling
has by no means passed out of New England life; it still flourishes in perfection in the great stock of the people,
especially in rural communities; but it is probable that at the present hour a writer of Hawthorne’s general
fastidiousness would not express it quite so artlessly. “A shrewd gentlewoman, who kept a tavern in the town,” he says,
in Chippings with a Chisel, “was anxious to obtain two or three gravestones for the deceased members of her
family, and to pay for these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board.” This image of a gentlewoman keeping a
tavern and looking out for boarders, seems, from the point of view to which I allude, not at all incongruous. It will
be observed that the lady in question was shrewd; it was probable that she was substantially educated, and of reputable
life, and it is certain that she was energetic. These qualities would make it natural to Hawthorne to speak of her as a
gentlewoman; the natural tendency in societies where the sense of equality prevails, being to take for granted the high
level rather than the low. Perhaps the most striking example of the democratic sentiment in all our author’s tales,
however, is the figure of Uncle Venner, in The House of the Seven Gables. Uncle Venner is a poor old man in a
brimless hat and patched trousers, who picks up a precarious subsistence by rendering, for a compensation, in the
houses and gardens of the good people of Salem, those services that are know in New England as “chores.” He carries
parcels, splits firewood, digs potatoes, collects refuse for the maintenance of his pigs, and looks forward with
philosophic equanimity to the time when he shall end his days in the almshouse. But in spite of the very modest place
that he occupies in the social scale, he is received on a footing of familiarity in the household of the far-descended
Miss Pyncheon; and when this ancient lady and her companions take the air in the garden of a summer evening, he steps
into the estimable circle and mingles the smoke of his pipe with their refined conversation. This obviously is rather
imaginative — Uncle Venner is a creation with a purpose. He is an original, a natural moralist, a philosopher; and
Hawthorne, who knew perfectly what he was about in introducing him — Hawthorne always knew perfectly what he was about
— wished to give in his person an example of humorous resignation and of a life reduced to the simplest and homeliest
elements, as opposed to the fantastic pretensions of the antiquated heroine of the story. He wished to strike a certain
exclusively human and personal note. He knew that for this purpose he was taking a licence; but the point is that he
felt he was not indulging in any extravagant violation of reality. Giving in a letter, about 1830, an account of a
little journey he was making in Connecticut, he says, of the end of a seventeen miles’ stage, that “in the evening,
however, I went to a Bible-class with a very polite and agreeable gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a
strolling tailor of very questionable habits.”

Hawthorne appears on various occasions to have absented himself from Salem, and to have wandered somewhat through
the New England States. But the only one of these episodes of which there is a considerable account in the Note–Books
is a visit that he paid in the summer of 1837 to his old college-mate, Horatio Bridge, who was living upon his father’s
property in Maine, in company with an eccentric young Frenchman, a teacher of his native tongue, who was looking for
pupils among the northern forests. I have said that there was less psychology in Hawthorne’s Journals than might have
been looked for; but there is nevertheless a certain amount of it, and nowhere more than in a number of pages relating
to this remarkable “Monsieur S.” (Hawthorne, intimate as he apparently became with him, always calls him “Monsieur,”
just as throughout all his Diaries he invariably speaks of all his friends, even the most familiar, as “Mr.” He confers
the prefix upon the unconventional Thoreau, his fellow-woodsman at Concord, and upon the emancipated brethren at Brook
Farm.) These pages are completely occupied with Monsieur S., who was evidently a man of character, with the full
complement of his national vivacity. There is an elaborate effort to analyse the poor young Frenchman’s disposition,
something conscientious and painstaking, respectful, explicit, almost solemn. These passages are very curious as a
reminder of the absence of the off-hand element in the manner in which many Americans, and many New Englanders
especially, make up their minds about people whom they meet. This, in turn, is a reminder of something that may be
called the importance of the individual in the American world; which is a result of the newness and youthfulness of
society and of the absence of keen competition. The individual counts for more, as it were, and, thanks to the absence
of a variety of social types and of settled heads under which he may be easily and conveniently pigeon-holed, he is to
a certain extent a wonder and a mystery. An Englishman, a Frenchman — a Frenchman above all — judges quickly, easily,
from his own social standpoint, and makes an end of it. He has not that rather chilly and isolated sense of moral
responsibility which is apt to visit a New Englander in such processes; and he has the advantage that his standards are
fixed by the general consent of the society in which he lives. A Frenchman, in this respect, is particularly happy and
comfortable, happy and comfortable to a degree which I think is hardly to be over-estimated; his standards being the
most definite in the world, the most easily and promptly appealed to, and the most identical with what happens to be
the practice of the French genius itself. The Englishman is not-quite so well off, but he is better off than his poor
interrogative and tentative cousin beyond the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and
hair-splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is always a little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson
would have had woefully little patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which in Hawthorne was almost as much a
quality of race as of genius; albeit that Hawthorne has paid to Boswell’s hero (in the chapter on “Lichfield and
Uttoxeter,” in his volume on England), a tribute of the finest appreciation. American intellectual standards are vague,
and Hawthorne’s countrymen are apt to hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand and a somewhat agitated
conscience.